DOUGLAS, Tux FAMLY OF. Archaeology has failed in its efforts to pierce the obscurity which veils the origin of the heroic race of which it has been said: A legend of the 16th or 17th c. told how, about the year 770, a Scottish king, whose ranks had been broken by the fierce onset of a lord of the isles, saw the tide of battle suddenly turned by an unknown chief; how, when the victory was won, the monarch asked where was his deliverer; how the answer ran in Erse, Sholto Douglas ("Behold that dark-gray man"): and how the warriar was rewarded with that Clydesdale valley which, taking from him its name of Douglas, gave surname to his descendants. This fable has long ceased to be believed. Equal discredit has fallen on the theory which, 60 years ago, the laborious Chalmers advanced in his Caledonia, that the Douglases sprang from a Fleming of the name of Theobald, who, between the years 1147 and 1164, had a grant of lands on the Douglas water from the abbot of Kelso., There is no trace of any connection between the Flemish Theobald and the Douglases; nor were the lands which he acquired on one side of the stream any part of their old domain on the other. What was boasted of the Douglases by their historian, two centuries ago, there fore still holds true: " We do not know them in the fountain, but in the stream; not in the root, but in the stem; for we know not who was the first mean man that did by his virtue raise himself above the vulgar." It was thought likely, in the beginning of the 15th c., that the Douglases and the Murrays had come of the same stock, and in this old conjecture all that is known on the subject must still be summed up.
1. William of Douglas, the first of the family who appears in record, was so-called, doubtless, from the wild pastoral dale which he possessed. He is found witnessing charters by the king and the bishop of Glasgow between 1175 and 1213. He was either the brother or the brother-in-law of sir Freskin of Murray, and had six sons, of whom Archibald. or Erkenbald, was his heir; and Brice, a monk of Kelso, rose to be prior of Lesmahago (a,dependency of Kelso, on the outskirts of Douglasdale), and in 1203 was preferred to the great bishopric of Murray. He owed this promotion, no doubt, to the influence of his kinsmen the Murrays, and it contributed not a little to the rising for tunes of his own house. He was followed beyond the Spey by four brothers, of whom one became sheriff of Elgin; another became a canon of Murray; a third, who had been a monk of Kelso, seems to have become archdeacon of Murray; and a fourth, who had been parson of Douglas, appears to have become dean of Murray.
2. Sir Archibald, or Erkenbald, of Douglas is a witness to charters between 1190 and 1232. He attained the rank of knighthood, and beside his inheritance of Douglas, held the lands of Hailes, on the Water of Leith, from the monks of Dunfermline, and had a grant of the lands of Levingston and Hirdmanston from the earl of Fife. He is said to have acquired other lands in Clydesdale by his marriage with one of the two daughters and heiresses of sir John of Crawford.
3. Sir William of Douglas, apparently the son of sir Archibald, figures in record from 1240 to 1273. He appears in 1255 as one of the Scottish partisans of king Henry III. of England; and in 1267, is found in possession of the manor of Fawdon, in North umberland. by gift of the king's son (afterwards Edward I.). He seems to have had a brother. sir Andrew, the progenitor of the Douglases of Dalkeith and Morton, and cer tainly had two sons.
4. MO, of Douglas, the elder, acquired land in Glencorse, in Lothian, by marriage with the sister of sir Hugh of Abernethy- and dying withotit issue about 1287, was suc ceeded by his younger brother.
5. Sir William of Douglas, distinguished in the family traditions as William the Hardy, had all the daring and restless spirit which was characteristic of his descendants. His first appearance is in 1267, when his head was nearly severed from his shoulders in defending his father's English manor from a foray of the men of Redesdale. Twenty years later, he is found at the head of an armed band, carrying off his future wife, a wealthy widow, Alionora of Lovaine, from the manor of her kinsfolks, the La Zouches, at Tranent, in Lothian. We hear of him immediately afterwards as spoiling the monks of Melrose, deforcing the king's officers in the execution of a judgment in favor of his mother, unlawfully imprisoning three men in his castle of Douglas, and beheading one of them. He was the first man of mark who joined Wallace in the rising against the English in 1297; and for this his lands of Douglas were wasted vcith fire and sword, and his wife and children carried off by Robert Bruce, the young earl of Carrick, then a partisan of England. But the knight of Douglas soon left the insurgent banners, and submitting to his old patron, king Edward I., to whom he had again and again sworn fealty, was sent prisoner to the castle of York, where he died about 1302. It appears that he pos sessed lands in one English, and in seven Scottish counties—Northumberland, Berwick, Edinburgh, Fife, Lanark, Ayr, Dumfries, and Wigton.
6. The history of his son, the Good Sir James of Douglas, is familiar to every one, as Bruce's greatest captain in the long war of the succession. The hero of seventy fights, he is said to have won them all but thirteen, leaving the name of " the black Douglas" —so he was called from his swarthy complexion—as a word of fear by which English mothers stilled their children. He was slain in Andalusia, in 1330, on his way to the Holy Land with the heart of his royal master, and dying unmarried, was succeeded by his brother.
7. Hugh of Douglas, of whom nothing is known except that he made over the now great domains of his family, in 1342, to his nephew Sir William of Douglas (son of a younger brother of the good sir James—sir Archibald of Douglas, regent of Scotland, slain at Halidon hill in 1333).